Eagon is an intelligent man whose heritage has always been unclear to him, and his investigation into his own origins has taken him somewhere he did not expect: into distortions of reality itself. Through rifts that appear and close without warning, he catches glimpses of a young girl named Zana — daughter of the great inventor who shaped the Atlas as it is known today. These tears in the fabric of the world are threads of memory, the Atlas has made tangible and real. Eagon is determined to find what is causing them and to save Zana from whatever has drawn her into this phenomenon.